Joe McGinniss and the dark arts of modern politics

McGinniss's book about the 1968 campaign changed the way voters see politicians. | AP Photo

McGinniss’s portrait of this carefully calculated campaign was so raw and unvarnished that he was accused — as he later more memorably would be with “Fatal Vision,” his 1983 book about the convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald — of seducing, then abandoning his subjects. The truth, as the author explained in a 1988 forward to a paperback reprint of “Selling,” is that he simply asked the Nixon advertising team to let him be a fly on the wall, and they agreed. He was then just a 26-year-old columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer and did not seem to pose any particular threat. (He had first asked for access to the Hubert Humphrey campaign, which turned him down.)

And for all that, McGinniss’s portrait of “Nixon advertistes” was unsparing, it was not entirely unsympathetic, chronicling as it did the Herculean efforts of an awkward, tortured, inward-turned man to make himself seem just likeable enough to win the White House. The paradox, as one Nixon strategist, Frank Shakespeare, confided to McGinniss at the time, is that without television, Nixon would not have had a chance at the presidency, “because the press would not let him get through to the people.”

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“But because he is so good on television he will get through despite the press. The press doesn’t matter any more.”

We now take so for granted the techniques and assumptions that McGinniss observed that it is bracing to hear him describe them in the hour of their birth.

A television-era candidate, McGinniss wrote, “is measured not against his predecessors — not against a standard of performance set by two centuries of democracy — but against Mike Douglas. How well does he handle himself? Does he mumble, does he twitch, does he make me laugh? Do I feel warm inside?”

Then, paraphrasing the philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum that “the medium is the message,” McGinniss went on: “Style becomes substance. The medium is the massage and the masseur gets the votes.”

Such writing helped make McGinniss’s book a sensation, and him a celebrity, and he would go on to write other fine books, including “Fatal Vision” and “Going to Extremes,” a closely reported seriocomic chronicle of the Alaska oil boom of the late 1970s. But in later years, he also struggled with alcohol and depression and became a kind of victim of his own fame and the hype surrounding his methods. “The Last Brother,” his 1993 book on Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, was roundly panned as shoddily sourced. His 2011 book on Sarah Palin, written after he moved next door to the Palin family home in Alaska to research it, met a similarly skeptical critical reception.

The Nixon campaign did not invent the use of commercial sales techniques. As early as 1956, Republican National Committee chairman Leonard Hall had declared, “You sell your candidates and your programs the way a business sells its products,” and as recently as 2002, White House chief of staff Andrew Card explained why the Bush administration had waited until September to push for public support of its Iraq policy by saying, “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”

And McGinniss did not, single-handedly, invent modern campaign reporting. Other journalists, including Hunter S. Thompson, Timothy Crouse, Tom Wolfe and Richard Ben Cramer, produced important breakthroughs of their own. But by crawling inside the gritty guts of a landmark campaign — and letting the strategists and spinmeisters speak for themselves, as well as for Nixon — he produced a riveting book of lasting relevance, one that will be read with profit as long as politicians subscribe to H.L. Mencken’s maxim that “democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want — and deserve to get it good and hard.”